Game: Eye Toy
Console: PlayStation 2
Rating: Rated E for Everyone
TORONTO (djc) — The Eye Toy for the PlayStation 2 is a camera that not only puts your image into the game, it responds to your motion — waving your hands, your head, your body, even your fingers. This motion allows you to interact with Eye Toy games.
The Eye Toy detects movement and is able to translate it into action. Once it’s active, you’ll see your image overlaid on the screen. You can browse the menus, confirming your selections by waving your fingers on circles. The circles represent selections and animate like a progress bar. It doesn’t need to be your fingers though. It can be your head or even your rump, as long as the camera can detect motion.
Installation of the Eye Toy is so easy that it hardly qualifies as “installing” something. You plug the Eye Toy in one of the PS2’s USB ports (located in the lower left corner of the front of the machine), and pop in the disk. That’s it. Once the disk is in, there’s a video that goes over simple instructions and gives you more tips on using the Eye Toy. The Eye Toy camera is best placed on or below your TV, and you should stand five to seven feet away. The best bit of advice when using the Eye Toy is to make sure it’s placed in a well-lit room so it can see movement, though there is a setting for low-lit rooms as well. Even the sort of person who gets lost in a closet should have no trouble.
And the games can be lots of fun. For example, in “Kung Foo,” one of the games included in the bundle, you thrust your hands out to “punch” little ninjas as they try to jump on your image. After a few games you’ll be waving your arms like an out-of-control Tai Chi instructor. The experience is a similar to playing “Dance Dance Revolution” — you feel kind of silly at times, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun.
The games and menus are controlled entirely by your motion. You don’t need the Dualshock controller at all — although it can be used to browse the menus, if you wish.
The software comes with twelve games. All are very simple and revolve around themes of hitting things, juggling things, or wiping things.
Some examples include:
Slap Stream: This game is a little like Whack-a-Mole, where you lash out at Rat Men, and are penalized for whacking cartoon girls.
Soccer Craze: This game has you juggle a soccer ball, trying to prevent it from falling out of the screen. You can also direct the ball into monkeys and hooligans that taunt you from the windows. It’s a little like pinball in a way.
Wishi Washi: This game has you frantically rubbing away the condensation on windows before the time runs out, like a giant Scratch n’ Win.
Other games have slight variations on these themes. For example, “Mirror Time” is a lot like “Slap Stream,” only reversed — you’re supposed to hit the mirrors the girls are trapped in, while avoiding the ones the enemies are trapped in. Also, the game will flip the screen around so that you have to think about where your left and right actually are.
None of these games have a whole lot of depth to them, but they’re fun for a party setting. They’re good in the same way “Dance Dance Revolution” is good — they get gamers off the couch and doing something besides eating Doritos. After a few frantic frames of “Kung Foo,” I felt like I’d done a mini workout. Kids will probably enjoy them, and I can see adults having some fun too (particularly after a few, ahem, bottled refreshments). The hardest part is trying not to make Bruce Lee noises during “Kung Foo.” Really, it can’t be done.
In addition to these games, the Eye Toy has other abilities: There’s a “Play Room” section that has various special effects you can play with. The coolest one is “Materialize,” which reduces your image to particles when you move, like the Enterprise is beaming you up or something.
Also fun is “Rainbow,” which causes a psychedelic rainbow blur whenever you move. Canadians who grew up with the old 70s show The Hilarious House of Frightenstein will instantly be reminded of that old classic, which featured a werewolf dancing to songs of the 60s and 70s on just such a screen. It’s enough to make you want to pop in some Doors and dance away.
Finally, the Eye Toy will allow you to record video messages, complete with sound. You can record up to a minute and save them to a memory card. However, you’ll need a pretty big card — even a 10 second message takes up more than a megabyte of space. Remember, a standard PS2 memory card holds eight megs.
There’s a lot of potential in the Eye Toy — because it’s a USB device, it could (in theory) work on a PC. Sony hasn’t done anything with this yet, though some intrepid hackers on the Internet are working on it. If Sony decides to make it work with the PS2 network adaptor, more coolness abounds — think of the ability to swap video messages, or import your image into a game of SOCOM II so that the guy you whack gets a good look at the smug expression on your face. I’d love to see Sony and third party developers get to work on that.
For now though, the Eye Toy inspires enough thrills. It certainly helps that the price is surprisingly low. It sells for about the cost of a standard new PlayStation 2 title, which is very good. And besides, when was the last time you burned calories when playing a game?
